Falstaff

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by Robert Nye


  (Humphrey crossed himself.)

  ‘—and Santa Maria island,’ went on Thomas, ‘which is to the east of St Miguel – and I swear I never heard any argument so glib or so thin-lipped in my life!’ he added, with an inconclusive leer of aggression.

  Hal’s nostrils shivered. ‘I never said they weren’t,’ he said.

  ‘He never did,’ said Humphrey. ‘It is the truth.’

  ‘He never said they were not what?’ said John.

  ‘Azores,’ said Hal.

  ‘He never denied for a second that they were Azores,’ suggested Humphrey.

  One of the greyhounds yawned.

  The viol screamed.

  I mashed my tongue.

  The princes drank in silence for a while. John scrubbed at his stubby tower of a neck. Thomas examined the contents of his bowl with vague disgust. Humphrey proposed a game of chess, but this was ignored. Hal’s eyes were more like weasels now than hawks.

  ‘The island of Graciosa,’ he said at last, in a very loud voice, ‘is the most westerly of the Azores.’

  ‘Northerly,’ said Thomas.

  ‘And St Jorge island is more to the south than Graciosa,’ Hal continued, ‘with the island of Pico, again to the south, and opposite the same Graciosa.’

  ‘But you said before—’ began John, then stopped. He could not remember what it was that his brother had said before.

  ‘Then the island of Jesus Christo—’

  ( by Humphrey)

  ‘—is directly opposite Graciosa,’ said Henry, ‘but more to the east.’

  ‘By God, it’s moving!’ roared Thomas. ‘My brother the Prince of Wales has invented an island that travels!’

  ‘Shut up!’ warned Henry – and sitting in the shadows I would have advised his brothers to heed him. But Thomas and John were too deep in their cups to care. Mr Poeticule Skogan’s bad verses no doubt. A man can be driven to drink by exposure to bad verses. I have often observed it.

  When the princes came out into the street – the stars dipping long fingers into the Thames – Prince Hal began chanting the names of his precious islands in a very irritable and irritating psalm.

  ‘The island of Sal, the island of Boa Vista, the island of Maio, the island of Sao Tiago—’

  ‘Stuff your islands!’ shouted Thomas.

  ‘Santa Luzia,’ chanted Henry. ‘St Vicente, which lies due east. Ilheu Branco. Sao Nicolau. Brava …’

  ‘Brava basta!’ cried Thomas, and hit him.

  ‘Fogo!’ cried Henry. And hit him back.

  They had played the fox. They had played the goat. And now the four princes were determined to play the lion and the tiger too. A sprawling brawl soon occupied the street. Hal and Humphrey were easily getting the better of Thomas and John. The offspring of King Henry IV were beating each other with pieces of rolled up parchment and bags of beans. I lurked in the doorway of the Boar’s Head, out of the starlight, out of the moonlight, and completed some of my education in the ways of the world of power.

  And all the while the four of them hurled these names of their stupid islands back and forth like bad fruit. Like exotic insults.

  ‘Ufantanta!’

  ‘Bulama!’

  ‘Buavo!’

  ‘Iwonchi!’

  ‘SALVA!’

  ‘SPOSA!’

  ‘BAUCHI!!’

  The brawl spilt all through Eastcheap. Windows were broken. Carts overturned.

  At last, some frightened citizens, roused from their beds by the racket, called for the Mayor and the sheriffs to save them from what was supposed to be Mr Glendower at least and the End of the World more likely. It was not so much the princes. But their followers were breaking bones in earnest. I think some of the thicker hangers-on imagined the names of those islands were new-fangled abuse in Italian. I did my best to save Hal from disgrace, tugging at his sleeve and warning him the Mayor had been sent for. All I received for my trouble was a black eye. But he was to recall the attempt at rescue with more kindness and gratitude later.

  So much for England, Harry, and St George. Four princes of the Blood Royal were arrested, and spent the night in jail.

  Bolingbroke had the news next morning. He sent for the Mayor and the Aldermen and the sheriffs. Nobody quite anticipated what the King would do. It was guessed that Hal would have complained to him. And it was assumed that Humphrey would follow him in every suit. I know that William Gascoigne, the Chief Justice, made a good show of brow-beating the Mayor at first, demanding to know what the city of London had been thinking of.

  ‘The law of England,’ said the Mayor. ‘And the keeping of the King’s peace.’

  Bolingbroke must have liked this answer. Perhaps he was already being troubled with bad dreams, and the notion of his peace being defended and upheld by his loyal citizens of London was more powerful at that moment in his mind than the affront which his sons had brought upon themselves and him by riotous behaviour.

  Hal was in a fury. But there was nothing he could do about it. If anything, I think this single event inspired some of his attitude towards the sober citizenry of London in the years to come, for he resented their criticism, and their abrogating to themselves the right to interfere in his quarrel with his brothers. He remembered also the fat man in the streets of Eastcheap who had tried to warn him of the Mayor’s approach.

  For myself: I observed that the highest men in the land were prepared to fall out over the lowest and smallest things. If princes fight over the names of islands they have never seen, and which they will never even visit in all likelihood, how can the King have a peace to keep?

  Late. I began this late, and I finish it as the chimes again remind me it is midnight. Chimes at midnight in a different context now.

  One word more. This is – this was – the Feast of St John of the Latin Gate. Because such dates may one day pass from the minds of men – who knows how the world might change, with England the way it is going? – I set it down briefly that the feast we celebrated today remembers the dedication of the basilica by the Porta Latina in Rome, where the blessed St John was hurled into a vat of boiling oil by order of the Emperor Domitian. And jumped out again unharmed, uncooked, unworried. St John, indeed, was the only one of the twelve apostles who was not called to martyrdom. He died at Ephesus at a great age. About the year 100.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Sir John Fastolf’s farewell

  8th May

  Hanson and Nanton take this down. The heavenly twins. Castor and Pollux. Caster oil and bollocks. My pet Dioscuri. And Hanson in his day has been something of a horse-tamer. And Nanton was a boxer. My morning and my evening stars. My Gemini of baboons. God’s farts, sir, an inseparable case of coxcombs.

  Speaking of baboons – Nanton’s face is not unlike the face of the great baboon you can see in the show at Southwark. I suppose it was the boxing did it. Put the finishing touches to what his mother and his father first began. As for Hanson, he is more delicate. He walks like the baboon.

  My brace, my composite crystal, my pair of twingle-twangles.

  They took the same girl to Chester Races once. The girl grew excited watching the stallions parade, so Hanson slipped his hand in under her dress, and was soon playing with her there in the middle of the crowd. Such a press, such excitement, nobody noticed. But Hanson sneezed, and snatched his hand away an instant. When he put it back up under the girl’s dress, in search of the wet playing-place, he found another hand already there, busy at work doing what he had been doing. It was Nanton, of course. They stood side by side, with the girl just in front, leaning herself against the fence, and they finished her off between them. The horse lost.

  There. Did you write all that, Hanson? More bloody fool you. But faithful. They’re faithful dogs, these henchmen.

  I make my men write lies about themselves. I tell the truth about me, but I tell lies about them. For the pleasure of having them write it down. Yet, having said that I tell lies about them, I have told the truth about me. Thu
s the reader will learn the scope and power of my honesty. It is unparalleled, like my girth.

  I skipped a day yesterday.

  It’s a piss-pot of a day today, and again to tell you the truth I’ve no stomach for much memory.

  I spent yesterday afternoon with Miranda in the garden. Ineffably sweet air. Dark boughs and our pale blue Norfolk sky. Flowers starting to sprout, and shrubs to do the things shrubs are supposed to do at this time of the year. (I never took much interest in the under earth. That can wait until I get there.) My skin felt as dry as a snake’s. Yet the air was exquisite. We watched the scarlet and black carp twist in and out of the iris roots in my pool. Miranda spoke for an hour of the terrible punishments we are promised for a little pleasant sin. I took her hand in a manner so quiet that she felt no wish to withdraw it from my grasp. Her voice trailed off and her eyes filled up with burning tears.

  I said: ‘We owe a debt of punishment, yes, my dear. That we must pay in Purgatory, helped by the prayers of our friends who remain behind. But even in Purgatory there will be more joy than there is on earth. As for sins, and the forgiveness of sins – I believe in them both. I’d be a fool if I didn’t believe in the former, and I’d be a damned fool if I didn’t believe in the latter.’ I stroked her hair as we stood by a pointed lily, an arm’s length in height, with a great shining pod as tongue, fleshy in substance, of the darkest crimson, black veiled with red. I said: ‘Do you think that I could bear for an instant the thought of the great moral eye of God fixed upon me, if it were not for our Lord Jesus Christ?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Miranda. Her hair was plaited and braided with pearls. She wore a broad silk girdle tied about her waist.

  ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘what the Church means – or so I trust, and Friar Brackley puts me right when I stray into opinions that are just motions of my own mind. The mind of the Church is clear enough, as it seems to me. We sin. We are born into sin. We sin and we sin again and again, despite all our penance and good intentions and all the wishing that it could be otherwise. We can’t change human nature. But Christ translates it. The grace of our Lord’s sacrifice is the complete removal of all that guilt and stain of our poor sins. I could come before God with sorrow – but that would not be enough. It is our Lord that is enough.’

  ‘You do not often talk like this,’ said Miranda.

  ‘I am hardly a holy man,’ I pointed out, ‘but since you brought up the subject, I’m making my own position clear.’

  ‘Which is that of a sinner,’ said Miranda.

  ‘A sinner,’ I said.

  Miranda touched the lily’s tongue. ‘A boy told me once that really bad sins committed after baptism could not be forgiven,’ she murmured.

  ‘Ask Friar Brackley,’ I told her. ‘But I know what he will tell you. Deny the Church her power to forgive sins, and you deny Christ. The Montanists did that, and many other sorts of heretics.’ I caught her hand again. ‘Oh it is hard enough to believe any of it,’ I cried. ‘God is a tall story. The crucifixion and the resurrection – both tall stories. But don’t you see, that might well be because they are true? If they were lies or fables they would look more plausible, they would suit us better. As it is, they suit us only in the sense that we are a tall story too. The world – the nature of man – our natural, actual, formal, and habitual sins. All tall stories.’

  Miranda snatched her hand away. ‘And you believe them?’

  I laughed. ‘Yes.’

  ‘But then why do you laugh?’

  ‘Because it is all so simple and all so complicated,’ I said.

  ‘I love our Lady and I like very much the going to Mass, and hearing it well sung,’ said Miranda childishly. ‘But I’ll admit to you now – where no one can hear us or heed us – that it does sometimes seem to me pretty far-fetched. Heaven and Hell. The whole thing.’

  ‘Certum est, quia impossibile,’ I said. ‘That is Tertullian. He saw it could well be true because it was so unlikely.’

  Miranda’s pretty face was now so puzzled that I had to laugh again – for sympathy’s sake.

  But she misinterpreted the laugh, and stamped her foot. ‘I wish you wouldn’t laugh so much,’ she said.

  ‘I like laughter,’ I explained. ‘I have this passion for clowns and fools, for the wisdom of foolishness, for those who dare to stand established order on its head so that its disestablishments show. Forgive me, dear niece. Down and out is my proper linear direction. I dare to go further. I am a down and downer, an out and outer.’

  ‘And a great big baby,’ said Miranda, pouting, toying with the hilt of my sword.

  ‘A monster,’ I agreed. ‘An abstruse infant playing with his own ego.’

  Then I kissed her. ‘I will tell you an old man’s secret,’ I whispered in her sweet little whirlpool of an ear. ‘It is this. Water will taste like wine if you use your tongue well.’

  ‘Now you’ve lost me again,’ complained Miranda.

  ‘Then it is time to find you properly,’ I said.

  I chased her down a steep path under the flowering trees. Bearing in mind my years, no doubt, and my great rotundity – not to speak of her real desire to be caught – Miranda did not run so very fast. She let me take off her scarlet dress in the vegetable patch, and despite a sudden May shower of warm rain we had quick sport and business in the buttercups.

  In the evening we went together down to the shore and watched a fine storm. The lightning shivered the masts on one of my ships. Sirius baring his fang. Not that I care for storms or weather much. But the sight put Miranda in a high mood and a passion. The night has left me knackered and I confess it.

  How are we for figs from Cerne Abbas?

  Memo. Put down an order for Macbeth to send.

  The usual.

  No. Double it. Benedicite!

  I reflect and deliberate this morning on the curious task I have set myself in undertaking these annals. Here am I, a captain of men and a knight of the realm of England, four score years beneath my belt, in my prime, worth my weight in silver if not gold, a most respected (if not respectable) and amazing (if rarely amazed) citizen, a denizen you might say of the wide world which I have made my home – here I am, an old man in a dry month, having fought in the warm rain with Miranda yesterday, and at the hot gates of Harfleur and Hell with Harry Monmouth and the pride of England, heaving a cutlass, all that – here I am, employing my days in this making of Days, in this long act of recall of my youth and other follies.

  It is no occupation for a gentleman.

  If I were not driven by the demon Truth, I should not undertake it.

  Truth. What is it? Pilate’s question. And he had the answer under his nose.

  Ravenstone taught me that Plato’s opinion was that a man would know the truth if he could sublimate his mind to its original purity. Greek nonsense. I do not believe my mind ever had any original purity. It was always as filthy as it is now, only less full of stuff when I was a child, since then I knew less of the ways of the world.

  Ravenstone taught me also that Arcesilaos said that man’s understanding is not capable of knowing what truth is. That may be so. But a man may also have been to bed with a woman, and known her carnally, without knowing her name – and then she was gone in the morning. How can I be sure I have not slept with Truth? Of course, if I were to accept the opinion of Carneades also – which is that not only is our understanding not capable of comprehending Truth, but that our senses are wholly inadequate to help us in the investigation – well, then I’d be well and truly sunk.

  Well. And truly sunk.

  I like the philosophy of Democritus best of all. That laughing doctor, that dear droll of Abdera, he taught that Truth lies at the bottom of a well. A well of what? Of memory perhaps. Not just my memory, mark you, or your memory. A common memory of more-than-us. A river might make a better image than a well. And truth there, in the river’s flowing. Never to be had, quite, because the moment you step into the river it is a different river.

 
Up Democritus, in any case! That laughing philosopher is my friend and mentor. He taught that the summum bonum is the maximum of pleasure with the minimum of pain, but did not make the vulgar mistake of supposing all pain antithetical to pleasure, or all pleasure identical with mere sensual enjoyment. Laughter has its principle in the soul.

  The soul laughs. Being the root of all forms of vital activity. A soul that could not laugh would be a dead soul, a stick, a devil.

  Besides, by Clio’s tits, madam, there is this ambition on a lower plane: to formulate some kind of truth from my experience. Not imposing a set pattern upon the reality of it. The form of what I write here is shaped by the tale and the telling itself.

  These Days – this process – my acts of attention to my life. My acts of attention form my Acta.

  Also, to tell you the plain truth, it passes the time. Which otherwise passes slowly, plain truth to tell.

  Now if only Eve had liked bananas better. We’d all still be in Paradise. And no need then for this fine fiddle about the individual consciousness or conscience. And sins. And forgiveness. And figs.

  I have done more work of a substantial character on my great Bill of Claims against the Crown. In due course it shall appear here, before going off to London by special delivery.

  Another reason for making these memorials – apart, that is, from the doubtful pleasure of remembering days now slipped for ever from my fingers – is in annoying my secretaries. I do not underestimate this motive. Here they sit, O Reader between the lines, singly or together, thin men all, skeletal things, thimbles, thieves of my adventures, and I make them dance like puppets to go about fetching boxes of pens and haystacks of paper to write down every word I care to say. I confess that it crosses my mind that it might be as good as mustard to compel a celibate priest to take down details of my little tricks with my niece Miranda. Just as it was sweet to watch Worcester wax hot and hotter at having to consider my memories of that tugging on the pink wet nipple of my young nurse Jaquenetta. Or pigsbum Bussard with his eyes popping out of his codpiece at the news of what poor Shallow failed to do to Mrs Nightwork in the mill in St George’s fields. Not that I have yet employed Fr Brackley in any such part. I keep him for my more sacramental confessions, do you see. In the tribunal of my penance. But you catch the piquancy? Thin men having to set down fat meals. Men whose only pleasure in women has come in the impotent extravagance of imagination being compelled to record the sober details of my many and most intricate amours. In the pages to follow, cowards will have to tell the tale of my heroic deeds in the battlefield.

 

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